"An Ocean of Loss, Vietnamese American Artist Dinh Q. Lê Maps the Refugee Experience"
by Xue Tan, ARTINFO Hong Kong
Published: June 28, 2012




The tragic footage of a refugee boat wrecked off Australia's Christmas Island in 2010 struck Vietnamese-American artist Dinh Q. Lê hard, and ultimately motivated him to create the large-scale installation “Erasure,” which is now on view at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery’s new space in Chai Wan. Dominating the work is a video of a burning ship — a 3D model of what Lê imagines the first western colonialist craft to land on Vietnam’s shores to have looked like. The ship’s conflagration is viewed from two angles which endlessly loop and overlap, creating a hypothetical opening scene to the story of the subsequent wars and exodus of refugees from the country which is the subject of the rest of Lê’s work.

Full text: http://www.artinfo.com/node/811388